Looking around southern Manhattan

I decided to take Friday off work as this weekend looks a little sketchy weatherwise. I had a couple of errands/tasks to do and thought I might as well take a day as it is a little slow at work. We are back in the Manhattan office, so that’s a nice relief.

So, this morning, I went down to southern Manhattan, more or less the TriBeCa area. It’s above the World Trade Center area and below Canal Street. There’s a lot of government buildings down there. Below is a photo of one of the courthouses. I think this is one that’s shown in the Law & Order opening.

One of the ideas that I had was to find the elusive juncture of Duane Street and Reade Street. NYC’s most populous drug store chain is called Duane Reade and I had always thought of it as two partners or perhaps one person. It turns out that there’s a Duane Street and a Reade Street each going, more or less, east-west in lower Manhattan. (I “discovered” the streets when I was on jury duty earlier this year.) I was speculating that the original Duane Reade would be at the intersection of the two streets. It turns out that they don’t really seem to join, but they get real close to each other, seeming to both hit the same sort of traffic circle, at the Courthouse. I guess the mystery of the naming still lives. Incidentally, there’s a “Duane Park” nearby. Duane was NYC’s first mayor after the American Revolution.

As I was walking along Duane Street, I ran into the African Burial Grounds again. It’s pretty interesting and is apparently a big draw. The first time I saw it, there was a fieldtrip by a bunch of junior highschoolers going through the area. This time, there was a group or 40 or so people being given a lecture by a Park Ranger. At this point, the grounds are still being built up so I imagine there will be even more traffic once it really opens up.

As I walked along Duane Street, I was getting more into the real TriBeCa area. Below’s a photo of the general area.

This particular area is reminiscent of SoHo.

A little further on, I ran into Battery Park City. That’s a residential area near the WTC/Battery Park (the most southern tip of Manhattan). Wow! The building continues at a frenzied pace. After 9/11, prices in Battery Park City apparently went way down. They still don’t seem to be extremely high even now. However, southern Manhattan really holds very little for people in the evenings and weekends; plus the monthly maintenance fees for those places is reported to be astronomical.

The NY Community College is down there. Maybe it was just seeing one character walking around with the single-most obscene T-shirt I’m aware of (it’s just a sentence with the “F-word” about five times and making no sense other than to indicate that the wearer is a hard-core idiot/jerk/psycho/malcontent), but it just seemed that the general character of the summer students leaves something to be desired. No big deal.

I did manage to get onto Chambers Street and go to the “Soda Shop”. I guess it was about a year ago or so that I first started my “organized” wanderings of Manhattan and the Soda Shop was the first place I went to during that period. It was on the local TV show “$9.99” and the show talked about the old style candy and their egg creams. I’ve now been there three times. The first time, I had the egg cream. The second time, I had the lime rickey. This time, I had the “Cracker Jack”. I hadn’t heard of it before, but saw it on the menu. It’s a drink that combines grape soda, seltzer, cherry, and lime. Not bad. But the lime rickey is still the best of the bunch.

I thought I had taken a picture of the Soda Shop, but it didn’t come out. Sorry. Not really all that much to see, to be honest.

Finally, I kept walking up Chambers Street and saw a minor, but interesting, item. NYC has all sorts of vendors in all sorts of setups. However, on Chambers, I saw two vendors doing business out of places that I hadn’t seen before. They were both operating out of buildings, but the “stores” can’t be described as anything other than closets. It was as if there was a utility closet in the building that these vendors had taken over. One was about four feet deep and maybe three feet wide. With displays hanging from the walls, the “aisle” was about two feet wide, maximum. Most of the store’s display was outside the building. The second place was very similar to it. It was a bit bigger, perhaps eight feet deep, but just as wide. No pictures (I’m embarrassed to take pictures like that as the owners are standing right there, and the interior wouldn’t show up with the quality of my camera anyway).